MY K-STARS this was easy. And super-basic. Like ... a remedial Thursday puzzle. The gimmick is transparent—doesn't take a genius to crack "APPENDAGE"—and then uncovering the theme answers was child's play. I mean, you could simply go ahead and write -AGE at the end of every theme answers without even looking at the clue. And then, looking at the clues, you could pretty much guess the theme answers straight away. Puzzle tries to make up for this staggering straightforwardness with a host of weird names (GARN, MILNER, ISIDRO, and, let's say, ANSA), but they provide about as much resistance as a cloud does a plane. The only hang-ups I had involved absurd little answers like THO (29A: "___ Nature, red in tooth and claw ...": Tennyson) and BSA (20A: Org. of which 18 U.S. presidents have been members) and TRY TO (8D: "___ Remember"), which I had as DAY TO.

I'm having trouble understanding the inclusion of ANSA ... I mean ... wow (64A: Vase handle). You could just make OCTA into ACT I and then make ANSA into INST. That way ORT goes to ART (win), OCTA goes to ACT I (win), ANSA goes to INST. (win) and SEA goes to SET (push). That took me no seconds to come up with. I'm sure there are better options. But screw fill, right? Yes, right. Apparently. Too much of a hassle, I guess.

In independent puzzle news—Matt Gaffney has a great new website, "Gaffney on Crosswords," that covers the world of crosswords from lots of different angles (this is in addition to his longstanding Crossword Contest website). Very much worth bookmarking and checking regularly. Also, Caleb Madison's crossword collaboration with actor/comedian Patton Oswalt is out now from American Values Crossword Club (get it here). And if you still crave more crossword puzzle action, I highly recommend this informative video ... enjoy:

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Rex...you liked this (or is "awesome" sarcastic)? What an ugly grid. And those corners are just dreadful: BMW and BAH cross BBS and PDQ/ESQ. LSAT stacked on STLO with GIS just below. OBERLIN (where?) crosses OMB, ORT, and ANSA.

Never heard the acronym BSA...BSE, now that I've heard of (Mad Cow disease). Must admit, I hate abbrev's. BAH!

Awfully easy for me too. Did not have to slow down at all. Remembered MILNER from Adam-12, ANSA from crosswords, GARN from his "Barfin Jake" space ride (Garn is space sickness scale), and OBERLIN from growing up in Ohio. So, no WOEs and no erasures.

I'm betting ISIDRO is atonement for last week's YSIDRO.

Other than being too easy this was pretty good puzzle. Not an overabundance of dreck (@okan - BSA Boy Scouts of America) and a cute theme/reveal. Plus any puzzle that has Barfin Jake and the Seinfeld evoking MINSK has got my vote.

Over a xwordinfo.com, there's a comment from Will Shortz about how he accepted this puzzle in 2009, and how much better fill has gotten since then.

This leaves me confused. Was this puzzle posted as a warning to others? Or did Will somehow lose all his other recent Thursday-caliber puzzles?

It was a mix of non-Thursday theme (this is a Tuesday or Wednesday theme, in that there's no difficulty and no trickiness), and a stupidly obtuse (N.B., the stupid was probably me) Texas sector. Blew through other than MILNER, SNEERS, TOILE and ENFIN. Could not get those to come together (I should have got SNEERS, but the rest is just bad fill). DNF because of that mess.

Two STARs in the grid bugged me considerably.

Did like STAGGERS and ALGIERS next to each other.

So, what the hell is a K-STAR? I tried googling, and all I get is a link to the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research magnetic fusion device and a country music station in Houston. Even the Wikipedia article on Arcurus makes no mention of a K-STAR. Insanely obscure, whatever it is.

Worst offender: OCTA/ANSA. I had OCTo, which is another legitimate spelling. oNSA seemed reasonable, because that entry was clearly just some random piece of crosswordese I didn't know. Which is to say, if you're crossing an ambiguously spelled entry with ANSA, you're doing it wrong.

Runner up: BEENE/MILNER. I only know BEENE from crosswords, and sometimes I misremember him as BEElE. So of course in this case, the crossing didn't give me a check here. (Martin MILlER? Sure, why not?)

I had the same experience as Rex. I figured out the AGE ending quickly and then the squares filled themselves in. Enjoyed learning the seven entries I didn't know led by the Garn Scale. Enjoyable despite being so easy.

This felt kind of like a mini-Sunday. I can imagine one with similar theme answers (with some longer ones added in, which probably wouldn't be too hard to come up with) having APPENDAGE as its (fairly transparent) title. I have to take issue with the assessment of BSA as "absurd" - I thought it was a reasonable inclusion (certainly not obscure by any stretch) which was clued well. This is coming from a long-time member of the BSA, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Well, I'm pleased that I finally finished one in time to come here before it's time for the next puzzle. Once again, "I've fallen behind and I can't catch up." I finished Sunday a couple of hours ago. Tsk.

I didn't think this was terribly challenging but I liked the theme answers. And learning about the Garn scale for space-sickness; that was cool.

Anent @Rex's comment yesterday that NIDI hadn't shown up in a NYTimes puzzle for nearly a decade, I guess he'd have looked it up, but shucks, I thought NIDI were as common as EELS. A staple of xwords. What I haven't seen in ages and ages is "ADIT", which is a mine entrance. On some planet.

Super-easy for me too. I surely would have swapped yesterday's and today's. I liked it, but it ain't no Thursday crossword.

Frankly, I think we are owed an official explanation for OCTA / ANSA. Both entries suck. Doubly sucks that they cross and a whole lot of people will be throwing a dart on 'A' or 'O' in order to try and finish. No satisfaction in losing to a guess. (Or winning on a guess.) I guessed right, but how does nobody catch and fix that?

Rexy's fix is perfect. But even Contrived Roman Numeral would have been better. MR. T / MCDI. We do so love those.

MY STARS I finished this PDQ. It sure felt old timey though. I did think that NAMATH's nickname was "Broadway Joe" so that was my only hang-up. I remember him in a pantyhose commercial with that wide grin of his.Really liked seeing San ISIDRO but it might induce a huh or two. If you've been to Buenos Aires you'd know it. It's like the Santa Monica of LA.Speaking of ALFA where is @Tita? Is she AWOL again?Oh, and ANSA is probably from the Maleska era.....

Third Witch: Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver'd in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver'd by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Second Witch: Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.

[Enter HECATE to the other three Witches]

HECATE: O well done! I commend your pains; And every one shall share i' the gains; And now about the cauldron sing, Live elves and fairies in a ring, Enchanting all that you put in.

[Music and a song: 'Black spirits,' &c]

[HECATE retires]

Second Witch: By the pricking of my thumbs,Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, Whoever knocks!

Man, this was harder for me than you guys. Early on, I had *nothing* but a couple of fill-in-the-blanks. The KOALA/ANO cross (I'm so upset that the N has a tilde one way but us untildied the other way. Not!) helped me get APPENDAGE, and so, like Rex said, the themers were so phigure-outable, they were my toe-holds. Once they were in place, the puzzle went quickly.

I had a dnf anyway with two personal Naticks: NAT/THO and OCTA/ANSA. I left them blank and probably should have gone back to guess.

I was just talking yesterday to my husband about being HOARSE. It. Is. Exhausting. I was a cheerleader in middle school and the first half of high school (until I realized we weren't cheerleaders so much as cheerdoers who were more worried about straight arms and cool jumps than ENGAGing the crowd in cheers – but nooooo (sing-song) . . .would anyone listen my wisdom?.. .) Anyway, I was HOARSE all the time. So I was TIREd all the time. Bottom line - being HOARSE stinks.

Funny how a swagger can turn into a STAGGER after one too many. Yeah. I had "Sw.Lo" until I noticed the problem.

TRY TO remember, AS A reminder. . .MY STARS, these days I'm so forgetful! It's been bothering me enough that I'm investigating, and I'm starting to realize that it's not that I'm forgetting so much as I'm not paying any &%$# attention in the first place!

Ok, @Steve J, @Z,and @Gil I.P. - You're not going to believe this. But as a smart Alec, on many many occasions, I have joked that "I've never had a bad pizza" or "I've never had a bad beer." And I'm serious! I even enjoy those 50 cent frozen ones and Old Milwaukee! (Now I prefer a junk Everybody's Pizza in Atlanta and a Hoegaarden, but still. . . )

Thanks for the helpful crossword video clip, Rex. How had I missed that all these years?

On star types: You just have to remember "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me." I think that's the main sequence; you can add "... Right Now! Smack!" They're in order of temperature, or something like that. Anyway, I had the K first, so the STAR was easy - wouldn't have been so easy the other way!

Nice to see PDQ Bach getting his due; but I'm so sad for those poor KOALAS, which somebody shot and stuffed -- I was looking for mOose there.

ANSA is Latin for handle - or maybe for goose - or maybe for both (handles are a bit like goose necks); so I got it, but not sure it's really English.

CAbin before CANOE, highLAND before SCOTLAND (before I got the theme); other than that, what everyone else said.

@Steve J, how strange to learn this was accepted by Will in 2009 and that he knows fill has gotten better since then. It seems he should either run it closer to its inception or ask Gary to take another whack at the fill.

Would a clue like, "Anagram for Nasa?" help people to get the first "A" in ANSA?

@Anon 2:20 AM, I think you're right about being to stretch the add AGE into a Sunday size puzzle. I quickly came up with some short ones: HOOVERDAMAGE "Dent in a vacuum?" and EXITRAMPAGE "What you get when someone yells "Fire" in a moviehouse?" Ooooh, that's a gruesome clue! But you get the point, with some thought I'll bet you could come up with longer, much better answers than these.

My coin came up O, so a DNF on a super easy Thursday. The odd thing is that I am more likely to remember ANSA in the future since I got it wrong. Guessing right doesn't seem to inspire the gray cells the same way that guessing wrong does.

I read Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury before I read Macbeth. Great stuff.

Today's puzzle was a light and easy to drink wheat beer with just a little too much hops for the style. ANSA belongs in a Friday IPA or a Saturday Porter.

Yeah, the puzzle was totally forgettable, but what made the experience of solving it worthwhile was to then come to Rex's blog and watch the inane YouTube video about how to find crossword puzzles online. I'm still laughing about that one.

The best dog I ever owned was Prudence, one puppy of a litter that was named for witches. I registered her with the AKC as Something Wicked (so she became Champion Poker Flat's Something Wicked). The breeder warned me she would live up to her name, and she did. Wicked smart, wicked fun, wicked lovely, and wicked. She overdosed on bunnies, and I miss her like crazy. So thanks for the Macbeth reprise. Good memories.

Learned some interesting things today. I had to guess a lot in the corners but I did guess correctly. @Z is right that I would probably remember them better if I had guessed incorrectly. In the end, success has little to teach you.

MY STARS! K-STAR! @4-Oh: har. Especially liked how yer Eric White video dude was able to so quickly bring up a puz with only 50 words in it. Just type in 5-0 and hit Enter. See that, Joe Krozel? Not so hard.

I once remember how the Shortzmeister held back a Quigley puz for about ten years before runnin it. So Whitehead got off relatively easy. At least they didn't post a nude baby pic of him with his puz, when they finally drug it outa the vault.

Wonder what a puz with AGEBEFOREBEAUTY=15(!) theme revealer would look like...

Will said he waited four years to trot this one out, cuz it was kinda the fourth reincarnagement of this here theme idea. Other top reasons to hold this puz back for several years...1. Stall, til the premier showing of Macbeth is less fresh in everyone's mind.2. Hope that some of those long black growths on the grid sides would wither and fall off.3. Waitin for an ORT lull.4. Vain hope that somethin really famous would happen in San ISIDRO.5. Wanted to give more Presidents time to join up with the BSA.6. Wanted to give that one poor U time to be fruitful and multiply. 7. Save for celebrating Government Shutdown bein over.

"Would a clue like, "Anagram for Nasa?" help people to get the first "A" in ANSA?"

It acknowledges the desperation but would be the right thing to do if the problem weren't fixable. Even on Saturday the ugliness of that cross is something to be smoothed out. Instead it was handled in a way that assured people would see it, hate it, and remember it more than anything else. Where is our explanation and apology?

I was feeling pretty darn smart for breezing through a Thursday puzzle . . . until I read all those comments about how it was a Thursday Lite, or maybe even a Tuesday Snoozeday. I got the theme immediately and breezed through until I got to the JEAN ARP down with an ENA cross. I did not know and do not think I should know ENA, but the absence of the ARP in my mind I credit entirely to my own ignorance. I got MILNER fast though hadn't thought/heard of him in decades. Favorite was the HOARSE and RASP combo (what do you call these cross-referential clues?). Overall I had fun, but the ego-inflated part of that joy has depleted.

I thought the reveal was clever, and the idea of a CLASSIFIED ADAGE brought a smile. But MY, an easy Thursday (THO I must confess to writing in FDR at 43D, even after two previous AGEs and the reveal!) Enjoyed seeing OBERLIN, where my husband and I met, let's see, 48 years ago. Help from previous crosswords: ANSA, ORT, ENA.

@jae - Maybe @LMS and @M&A can collaborate and create a puzzle with a HSIA/ANSA/YSIDRO corner and then another corner with LEOX/EELS/OTTOII. Ooooh - fun, fun, fun. Sort of like an elevator ride with Yanni and Ono on an infinite loop.

This was so easy I got it with my usual attempt to use only the across clues, very rare for me to pull off on Thursday. Using only the across clues they only trouble I had was that I had Landau for Milner. -skeptic 53

For us non- veteran x- workers. This was hardly " easy" what with ANSA, GARN ( as a measurement unit)) , K star,ENA and TEK in the mix. But I STAGGERED through it with a couple of good guesses. Experience as a solver certainly helps.

@johoHOOVERDAMAGE is fabulous and EXITRAMPAGEthat you and anon 2:07 came up with (LOVE JAMESBONDAGE!!!)

So ANSA notwithstanding, thumbs way up on a puzzle that gets folks to try and come up with even more theme answers...to me that's a hallmark of a successful puzzle.(I got a kick out of ESTREETBANDAGE!)

I thought yesterday's and today's could have easily been swapped, only bec adding to the end made it very straighforward, whereas Sam's front and back ends and making leap to HIS/HERS towels was more of a braintease.

Actually I would not have run these back to back as the type of theme is pretty similar, but there was a lot to like here!

@lms yesterday, may your fresh enthusiasm never be dampened by the naysaying humor-challenged myopics!

Themers were too easy. Fill not so much – a little slow in the SW (took a couple seconds to decide between OCTO and OCTA, but got it right) and SE (never knew PDQ related to Bach so seconds wasted there as well).

Nits . . .Can’t believe we have 2 stars in the grid.Clue for 25D, as it relates to 9D, is terrible. The only RASP a person has is in the toolbox. Someone has a RASPy voice. IMO.

This week's relative difficulty ratings. See my 8/1/2009 post for an explanation and my 10/15/2012 post for an explanation of a tweak I've made to my method. In a nutshell, the higher the ratio, the higher this week's median solve time is relative to the average for the corresponding day of the week.

All solvers (this week's median solve time, average for day of week, ratio, percentile, rating)

Got it at NEWYORKPOSTAGE; not right away but sorta PDQ. In stark contrast to yesterday, the "get" gives away the store. Fill troubles, though, shoved it back to medium for me.

I was very lucky on the SW natick. Had OCTo, naturally, and sat there staring at oNSA. It JDLR to me. Insa? Ansa? Wait, what was that word they used for Saturn's ring-handles? ANSA, I think. Let's go with that. Whew!

@Evil Bill & @rondo, check out @Anon 11:31. If that's not ED in drag I'll drink another Hsia Nidi pilsner. I'm pretty sure I've seen his DNA on a number of comments. Having an anonymouse make such brilliantly scorching comments is like Salieri stealing a Mozart piano sonata and passing it off as his own.

Wasn't it in SAN ISIDRO where Broadway Joe and Tom Jones STAGGERed into a bar and ENGAGED JEAN ARP? eh, maybe it was ALGIERS...

Yesterday I confessed to a tendency to guess wrong when the odds are 50-50, today we have OCTo/A. As to the "Low digits", the T from LSAT told it should be "Twos" while the E from...AGE argued for onEs; oh wait, there's another kind of "digit" - never mind.

Couldn't believe this is Thursday. The answers just fell, ANSA from crossword experience, and OBERLIN from who knows where. Questioned NAT, but the quote had to be THO, So I'm smiling all the way to tomorrow. Seems the ones I can do are always followed by something I can't begin to parse.

Haven't thought of Joe Willie in years, but I seem to remember that late in his career he had problems with his legs. About that time Johnny Carson asked Joan Rivers about him. Her reply, 'Who wants a man with two bad knees'.

After my DNF yesterday, I was tickled with this puz. Like @DMG it practically filled itself in. My ego was assuAGEd, thank you very much. ANSA is the sort of fill that you remember after doing years of XWs, especially in the Maleska era.